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The Movement

I decided to put together this blog because things have gotten a bit hectic. The AVEN forum has far, far too many posts to keep up with, and with the recent media attention that our community has been getting I wanted a digestible way for passersby to access a more in-depth discussion on asexuality.
If you happen to be one of those passersby, welcome to the busiest hub of the tiny little world of asexuality. Any questions you may have about asexuality can be conveniently answered in the information area. I’m the site’s founder and webmaster, we don’t like sex here. Make yourself at home.

For those of you who’ve been paying attention AVEN has, through no fault of our own, recently stumbled upon a small mountain of media attention. 30 minutes on Canadian cable, a six page feature in New Scientist Magazine due out in a couple weeks, and another 1200 words or so in Details Magazine come December. Maybe we had it coming. We’re so, ya know, not having sex. In response we’ve put together a media response team and a blog and yada yada yada, but the point is that all of these people keep calling me and coming to my house so that they can write about my absence of a sex life in national-nay-international arenas.
This is confounding enough as-is, but on top of it all they keep asking me, I suppose because I founded the site or something, if I this is the beginning of an asexual movement.

A movement?

It’s not a term that I’m used to thinking about. Sure all of this happened. We all found this place and built a community here, some of us talk about doing things to get the word out, but a movement? A movement implies unity, it implies direction and purpose and social change, and that’s not something that our community has ever gotten together and talked about.
But I’ll humor them, because they’re reporters and getting humored is really What They Do. The story of the asexual movement goes a little something like this:

This started, for me, around Freshman year of highschool. Imagine the most ridiculous thing that you can, and then imagine that it’s all anyone else cares about. I’d about given up on the possibility that I was a late bloomer, so I started struggling with a lot of things and subsequently started struggling with how to describe them. I went through a whole slew of words, for some reason “asexual” stuck. I got my shit together, I made a website.
At roughly the same time, all over the world, other people were going through the same process. Some were in their 60s, some had been married for years. Some were reflecting on a life of solitude, were perplexed at the highschool dating scene, were confused enough after being hit on for the umpteenth time that it sent them over the edge. More or less independently each of these people invented the word “asexual” to describe themselves and used it to start looking for answers. Sooner or later they typed it into Google, found this website and, more importantly, found each other.

And we weren’t here long before we started talking about Visibility (hell, it’s in the name.) The journey by which we’d gotten here seemed, to many of us, unnecessarily long and arduous, and we wanted to shorten the trip by making ourselves known to all of those wandering people out there who hadn’t stumbled onto the word asexual or happened to type it into Google yet. So we started spreading the good word, letting people know that asexual folk do, in fact, exist.

The trouble is, when we try to tell people that we exist they tend to insist that we don’t. They ask us if we’ve “checked” whether we’re gay, if we’re sure we’re not in denial. They assure us, calmly, that if we wait we’ll find the right person. For some reason, a lot of sexual people have a really, really hard time accepting the idea that putting slot A into tab B (or some similarity thereof) does not hold our constant, undivided attention.

See, what all of these sexual people have been told, and what all of us asexual people have been told, is that sex is necessary. In classrooms, in advertisements, in locker rooms and sleepovers we’ve all been told that everyone needs sex, that it’s unavoidable and that we had better learn to like it our spend our whole lives being miserable. From childhood onward we have all been told that sexuality is an integral part of happiness, that sex is something we have not necessarily because we want it but because we need it.

And all of us, sexual and asexual, have been lied to.

It’s a lie that we asexuals recognized the moment we arrived on the forum. We looked around and saw so much evidence to the contrary we wanted to cry (and many of us did). We’re told all our lives that we were destined to be miserable, and suddenly here are 1366 registered users telling us it just ain’t so.
So now our mission, our movement, is to expose that lie by showing ourselves to the world. News Flash: sex is a choice, and if it’s not fun don’t have it. If it is fun then be as safe as possible and have a blast. Just know that we’re here, that we’re getting along just fine and that as important as it might be to you you don’t need sex to be happy. If it ever gets boring, if that whole sexual thing ever gets tired and frustrating and you’re looking for a good time then, baby, you know where to find us.

The Asexual Visbility and Education Network hosts the world's largest online asexual community and archive of resources on asexuality.